Winter Wonderland

Hey y'all! Hope you all had a great Christmas and are looking forward to the New Year. We've been eating left overs all day yet seem to have more in the fridge now than when we started. Between work and the festivities it's been a while since I posted anything up here so I thought I'd better sort that out.

Last week I met up with some family and, amongst other things, we went to the Winter Wonderland on the corner of Hyde Park. It's basically a big fair ground with an ice rink, loads of places to eat and Zippos' Circus (which was awesome). All of these things were festooned with bright lights, often rapidly moving, and this provided a good opportunity to mess around with long shutter speeds. The pictures above and below had exposures of about half a second. As they were taken hand held and very much on the fly they are pretty blurry; however, the effect of the lights on the rides streaking brightly through the frame more than make up for the technical shortcomings of the shot, I think.

The next two shots were even more ad hoc. A bunch of us went on the Fun House which, asides from being a lot of fun, was actually quite perilous for my camera; all the moving walls and bits of floor led to it taking a few knocks. Still, I got these interesting looking photos out of it. There was a curtain of lit plastic tubes that you had to walk through and I just fired off a few frames as I went through. I wasn't even aiming so I can't take any real credit but I do really like the way they turned out. They're both quite abstract and the second one makes good use of negative, dark space which contrasts nicely with the brightly lit tube. The first one brings to mind those weird bio-luminescent creatures that are found in the depths of the sea; the tentacles of a carnivorous jellyfish maybe.

If I can get back to another fairground when I have time to use a tripod then I think there's real potential here for some imaginative work.

In the coming weeks I'll be finishing off a last few posts on my trip to Vietnam last year and I'll also come up with a post on using textures in photos. This is a post processing technique that blends images together to create a antiqued feel to your pictures. More next week!

One Thousand Thank Yous

Well that little ticker on the right of the blog seems to be saying that I have recently reached my first 1,000 page views and, I must admit, I'm pretty stunned by it. I started this blog on a whim back in March not expecting anyone other than my wife and parents to read it out of pity. As it turns out they very rarely look at it all and it would appear that I have no idea who most of my readers are but they come from 20 countries throughout the world. The stats say that my average reader is American and comes to the blog via Twitter on their Mac, so if that's you - Hello! As ever, if you like what you read, then by all means tell your friends and family about it and help in the push towards 2,000 page views.

I mostly write the blog because I enjoy it, but to have so many regular readers is certainly a motivation to continue the effort. I'm going to try to keep up the pace of posting, at least until I run out of photos anyway. I'm also going to try and find some time to update my website, which could do with a spring clean and is missing my most recent photos. I'll let you know when it's done.

As the new year dawns I'm looking forward to new travels around the globe and revisiting old haunts for new perspectives. My shot list seems to be getting longer not shorter so I guess I'll just have to start carrying the camera around a bit more; no great hardship. If you've only started reading in the past few months then you may want to go back to some of the earlier posts on the Lake District, South Downs and Inca Trail. All that's left to say is, once again, thank you; one thousand and eleven thank yous and counting.